Attribution of local land surface temperature variations response to irrigation over the North China Plain

Abstract

Irrigation substantially alters land surface temperature (LST) in different regions of the world. Studies have recently focused on quantifying irrigation-induced LST change based on remote sensing technology due to its high spatiotemporal resolution. However, the biophysical mechanisms of irrigation on LST remains poorly understood. Here we first investigated the impact of irrigation on LST during 2003–2012 over the North China Plain (NCP), which is one of the most intensively irrigated areas around the word. We then attributed the mechanisms underlying LST change between adjacent irrigated and non-irrigated croplands based on two surface energy balance-based methods: the Decomposed Temperature Metric (DTM) method and the intrinsic biophysical mechanism (IBM) method. The results indicate that at annual scale, irrigation produce an overall cooling effect over the NCP, with the mean observed LST change of −0.098 K, calculated LST change of −0.096 K for DTM method and −0.165 K for IBM method, respectively. Furthermore, the agreement between the annual observed and calculated LST difference indicate that DTM is a more robust method than IBM in quantifying irrigation-induced LST change over the NCP. The attribution method DTM reveals that components of albedo and emissivity has an average cooling effect of −0.012 K and −0.005 K, respectively, while incoming radiation lead to a weak warming effect of +0.01 K. The enhanced turbulent fluxes of latent heat flux dominate the cooling effect (−0.174 K on average), further offsets the sensible heat flux warming effect (+0.085 K). Another attribution method IBM demonstrates that the annual cooling effect of irrigation is mostly induced by changes in aerodynamic resistance (−0.175 K), whereas the biophysical contributions of albedo (−0.0005 K) and Bowen ratio (+0.001 K) have a negligible impact on LST. This study provides a useful reference for assessing local climate impact of irrigation when implementing environmental protection projects.